University of Alaska

Monkeypox, a potentially deadly disease caused by a virulent strain of a virus in the Orthopoxvirus genus, is spreading at an alarming rate, with over 1,800 U.S. cases identified as of mid-July in all but seven states.

Farther north, there is a much rarer, much more recently discovered and apparently much more benign cousin of monkeypox: Alaskapox.

From all indications, the reservoir for the Alaskapox virus is small mammals — as is the case with monkeypox, which contrary to its name, appears to be maintained in rodent populations.

No cases of monkeypox have been detected in Alaska, even though the state Department of Health has urged residents to be on the lookout for it.

As of now, only four people are known to have ever been infected with Alaskapox, three women and one child, all in the Fairbanks area. Since then, investigators have tracked the virus to tiny voles and similar animals that scurry around the region’s boreal forest.

The first human case was in 2015 and discovered by Dr. Zachary Werle of Fairbanks, who treated a patient with what seemed like a spider or insect bite, along with some other illness symptoms that included fatigue and swollen lymph nodes. Werle took a sample, sent it off for analysis, and it was ultimately identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a new-to-science strain in the Orthopoxvirus family. It got named for the state where it was discovered.

The second case was in 2020, and two more cases emerged last year. Among the four patients, three were in households with pet cats or dogs or both, which might have been the links between the wild populations and people. There is no evidence that Alaskpox can be spread between people.

While the symptoms have been uncomfortable, Alaskapox has been nothing like its more serious relatives: smallpox, which was present for thousands of years and is believed to have killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone but was eradicated globally by 1980, and monkeypox, which causes milder smallpox-like symptoms but nonetheless can cause fatalities, especially among young children, according to the World Health Organization.

Alaskapox does not seem to pose much of a threat to people — at least, not yet.

“It’s difficult to know how a new virus will behave in a population when we only have four cases. We can’t say that it affects all individuals in a population in the same way because we just don’t have the data,” said Katherine Newell, a CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer assigned to the Alaska Department of Health. “We don’t know how it might affect, for example, immunocompromised individuals or individuals with serious underlying health conditions because we haven’t seen those population groups affected.”

It is possible that more people have been unknowingly infected, as the symptoms are “pretty non-specific,” Newell said. “A lot of people might just think it’s just a spider bite and feel slightly under the weather and not think much more of it,” she said. Hence the public education campaign by state health officials, she said.

Discovery grabs attention and raises questions

As a newly identified zoonotic disease – meaning a disease that can pass between species – it has gotten a lot of attention from scientists at the CDC and elsewhere. “As with any emerging infectious disease, the CDC is always going to be very interested in finding as much as we can about the virus,” Newell said.

A key question is: How broadly is this spread in the environment?

After last year’s two cases were identified, Newell and colleagues from University of Alaska Fairbanks and the CDC fanned out into the boreal forest around Fairbanks last September to try to get some answers. They trapped 209 small mammals to get tissue and blood samples. The results: 32 of the animals, mostly red-backed voles but also flying and red squirrels, had antibodies showing exposure to some type of Orthopoxvirus, and seven red-backed voles were carrying Alaskapox virus, as shown by DNA analysis.

None of those animals appeared to be affected by Alaskapox or any related virus. “We didn’t find any lesions and they didn’t look sick,” she said.

Another question to be answered: How long has Alaskapox been in the environment?

Newell and her colleagues discovered that Alaskapox predates the discovery of human infections by at least a couple of decades. Tests of animal tissue samples stored at the University of Alaska Museum of the North revealed signs of the virus in red-backed voles dating back to the 1990s, she said.

That compares to monkeypox, which was discovered in 1958 in captive monkeys in Denmark, with the first human infection recorded in 1970 in a baby boy in the Democratic Republic of Congo. So far, the current outbreak has resulted in about 22,500 documented cases globally, according to the CDC.

Discoveries show importance of often-neglected small mammals

To Falk Huettmann of UAF’s Institute of Arctic Biology, the recent Alaskapox discoveries carry lessons about environmental health and zoonoses.

There are all sorts of viruses and diseases running through animal populations, such as the current highly pathogenic avian influenza, Huettmann said. The vast majority are unknown to people, he said.

“The issue is about detection. You need to detect to confirm,” he said. When zoonotic diseases are discovered, it’s either by random chance or when there’s a problem “so big that you can’t ignore it,” he said. “In the meantime, there is a lot of stuff out there that we don’t know.”

Another lesson is the importance of small mammals, which are critical parts of entire ecosystems. “They get overlooked,” he said. “Small mammals are not well understood. They’re not well-studied. We do not understand what are the dangers.”

To illustrate his point, Huettmann pointed to budgeting decisions at the state level. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Wildlife Conservation has over 200 staffers, including several biologists managing and studying animals like moose, caribou and bears, but only five positions for biologists devoted to study of non-game species.

A third lesson is about how people can disrupt nature and the natural wildlife population cycles, he said. Those disruptions include human-caused climate change and introduction of vectors through travel and transportation. “All these cycles are really off,” he said. “I think the human system has overruled the natural cycles.”

Alaskapox is not the only new Orthopoxvirus discovered in recent years.

In the nation of Georgia, a new virus was discovered in 2013 in lesions on the skin of a pair of cattle herders. Further investigation found the virus, named Akhmeta after the town where it was discovered, among small mammals like mice.

In Italy in 2015, a new Orthopoxvirus was found in captive monkeys at a sanctuary, 12 of which died. Follow-up testing found signs of that virus, named Abatino, in small rodents.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the number of division biologists assigned to the study of small animals. In addition, a caption for a photograph has been updated to correctly identify a CDC investigator as Clint Morgan.

A CLIFF NORTH OF LITUYA BAY — Dan Mann hands me a clump of orange dirt the size of an almond. He instructs me to put it in my mouth.

“What’s it taste like? Does it crunch? Ash crunches because there’s glass fragments in it.”

“It crunches.”

“It’s from Mount Edgecumbe,” he says, referring to a volcano 100 miles away, near Sitka. “From an eruption 13,000 years ago.”

As I spit out the grit, I realize that date doesn’t mean much to me. But it means a lot to Mann, a University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher who looks at landscapes and sees what they were thousands of years ago.

I have admired Dan for years, especially when he is off trading Alaska’s winter for New Zealand’s summer or when I have sat in on a class he teaches. I’m glad to finally be out in the field with him. Especially here, in his place, one of the most dynamic areas of an ever-changing state.

Mann, a few years older than me, moves through the woods like a bear and knows this rugged part of the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park better than anyone.

He is a Quaternary Period geologist, and also a forester and entomologist and someone who can answer pretty much any ecological question you would ask of this wild place. He is tall as a grizzly standing up, has long legs that propel him across the beach faster than I can walk, and makes decisions fast.

The Outer Coast isn’t Mann’s only gig. Each summer, he travels to a favorite river on the North Slope where he and UAF’s Pam Groves have found thousands of bones of mammoth, steppe bison and Pleistocene horses. He teaches UAF classes on climate change and the history of Alaska’s landscapes and animals. He studies landslides, like Pretty Rocks in Denali National Park, and an ancient glacial-outburst flood at Black Rapids Glacier south of Delta Junction.

But this place of tall young mountains, giant earthquakes, green rainforests and large bears has kept him coming back for nearly half a century.

His first trip was in 1977. As a 24-year-old, he camped on Cenotaph Island within Lituya Bay, dug soil pits, and almost got fired for scheming to get his climbing buddies to join him for an ascent of nearby Mount Crillon.

A bit later, a retired scientist named Richard Goldthwait of Ohio State University looked to this broad-shouldered young man who was intrigued with the same wild country.

“Have you solved the mystery of the terraces?” he asked Mann.

The “marine terraces” on the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park are green plateaus a few difficult miles inland from the Gulf of Alaska.

The terraces were once underwater. In the last 40,000 years, tectonic movements along the nearby Fairweather Fault have raised the squishy ground upon which we pitch our tents 1,500 feet above the Gulf of Alaska. The Earth’s crust around this fault experiences some of the most rapid movement on the planet. Evidence of this is the ever-rising 15,300-foot Mount Fairweather, just a dozen miles from where we are camped.

Though they are hell to get to, the terraces are pleasant enough once you reach them. They are spongy benches so wet that big trees don’t grow on them. They feel like something out of Lord of the Rings, with mist in the air, gurgling creeks, small friendly pines and mountain hemlocks twisted by winter storms. You wouldn’t be surprised to bump into a bunch of elves picnicking in a glade.

The puzzle of the terraces to which Goldthwait referred is whether or not they were part of the migration route by which the first Americans traveled southward from Bering Strait shortly after the last ice age. At that time, blue ice a mile thick smothered most of the continent’s land. But the Gulf of Alaska coastline might have been ice-free.

“Somehow you’ve got to get Siberians to South America,” Mann says. “This is the bottleneck — the skinniest part of the continental shelf is right offshore here.”

Finding a wooden kayak paddle in terrace peat would answer that human-migration question cleanly. But there are no quick answers up here.

Mann has not found any prehistoric boats or paddles in the last 45 years, but he keeps coming out here with his Vietnam-era folding Army shovel with the polished wooden handle. With it, he chops steps in the dark walls of soil and smooths it to read what has happened over the millennia. Each small insight dabs more color on the big picture.

About a dozen people have accompanied Mann here since the late 1970s. A repeat visitor is UAF ecologist Ben Gaglioti, who invited me along on this trip. Gaglioti shares Mann’s interests and has the brainpower and physical endurance to hang with him.

With all his experience here, Mann is the natural leader of me, Gaglioti and two other scientists out on this trip. I take note of him suspending a tarp over his tent even though his rainfly looks fine. He tells of a biblical rainfall out here once, when he and a partner endured 16 inches of rain in two days.

He also once needed to sneak around a half-dozen grizzly bears that were feasting on a whale carcass on the beach. While leading us through the jungle in the heat of the day, he yells “Wake up!” to assure bears hear us before they see us.

I would be terrified to walk the bear footprints pressed into the moss without him. He seems to have a quiet agreement with the bears. When he stops at a tree scratched up high and bitten by passing bears, he takes his red baseball cap off, reaches it five feet above his head with his walking stick and rubs it high on the tree. He leaves a mysterious, extra-tall scent for the bears to ponder.

Though he lets you know out loud that you should rinse your dehydrated-dinner bag in the creek before you put it in the waterproof sack to hang in a tree, his boyish smile appears often. He speaks with a relaxed tone. He asks sincere questions and waits for answers.

Here on the almost-never-visited outer coast of Glacier Bay, Mann is unearthing a big, long-developing story, doing old-fashioned shovel-and-backpack science while welcoming help from satellite and lidar images.

I ask him about his science and his adventures here when he agrees to speak into my recorder on our last day out. At the end of an interview under a tarp he has strung over our eating area, he becomes almost apologetic as he explains one of the reasons he keeps coming back to this exhausting, magnificent place.

“I just like being out here.”

Elaina O’Brien ran back to staff housing on a busy morning at the Camp Denali lodge last Friday to grab the radio she’d forgotten at her cabin.

She looked down at the flagstone path, and what she saw made her think: “Am I hallucinating? Did I have some kind of psychedelic mushroom for breakfast? What. Is. That?”

Was it a slug? A desiccated animal body?

“But it was right on the staff trail!” she said. “And I looked and I was like, ‘Oh my God, am I seeing this for real? Like, it’s just a million bugs, being herded by these other bugs, in this slimy trail.”

O’Brien is the housekeeping and serving coordinator at the lodge, which is in the Kantishna area at Mile 89 of the road that cuts through Denali National Park and Preserve.

It turned out she was looking at a new, yet-to-be-named species of a type of fly called a gnat snakeworm. In that moment, they were traveling together as larvae in a “rare phenomenon,” said Derek Sikes, curator of insects and professor of entomology at the University of Alaska Museum of the North and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Hundreds of larvae, each almost a centimeter long, form the crawling column. Columns of larvae can stretch up to 2 or 3 feet, and they may gather in that formation only for a few hours, Sikes said.

Sikes has been studying these Alaska insects since a docent at the Museum of the North brought in a picture of the larvae and some specimens back in 2007.

“It was completely ‘X Files’ to me — I had never heard of or seen this phenomenon before,” he said.

And he wasn’t the only one. Despite how conspicuous the formation looked, longtime naturalists hadn’t seen it in the state either, Sikes said.

Since then, gnat snakeworms in this column-like formation have been reported near Fairbanks, in Katmai National Park and Preserve and in Kenai Fjords National Park. But the Denali National Park-area sighting was a first, Sikes said.

He then raised some of the larvae into adult flies, which allowed him to figure out what type of flies they were. By looking at their DNA and studying their anatomy years later, Sikes determined these gnat snakeworms were a new species, distinct from their closest relatives in Europe — which are also known to move in a similar mass procession.

“Some people find it sort of visually repulsive because it does look a little strange, but it’s not harmful to people,” Sikes said. “These things are not a problem for anybody. They’re not invasive. There’s nothing to worry about with them.”

It’s not yet known why there weren’t observations of these snakelike formations in Alaska before 2007, Sikes said. It’s likely someone would have reported it, but there’s no evidence of that, he said.

But even why the insects do it is a mystery.

“Nobody really knows exactly why they migrate in these great numbers together and also why they take this particular shape of a long column,” Sikes said.

There are a couple ideas about why they travel like that, Sikes said. It may be that since the larvae tend to live in moist, dark and cool areas, they try to stay closer together on a road or trail that’s exposed to sunlight so they lose less moisture.

Or, Sikes said, they might be traveling that way because it makes them look like a larger animal.

“It’s just a fascinating piece of nature that most people have never experienced or seen before,” Sikes said. “Even for most entomologists, it’s a really rare phenomenon.”

Sikes and colleagues plan later this year to publish their research on the insect and name the new species.

At the lodge on Friday, O’Brien said she “got way down close” to look at the gnat snakeworms and realized other people needed to see. She ran to the staff room and urged the guides to come and take a look. The group watched as the insects edged off the path.

And then, after it had materialized, the line of larvae soon disappeared without a trace.

“When we went to go back a couple hours later, there wasn’t even, like, a slimy slug trail or any, like, bits and pieces left behind,” O’Brien said.

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

Nearly six tons of marine debris collected from a remote island were offloaded in Ketchikan last week. The debris is bound for recycling in Seattle, but researchers hope it could also shed light on the kinds of garbage that find their way into the ocean.

Crews hauled enormous cloth bags full of garbage off of the F/V Polar Lady on Wednesday — 11,500 pounds in all. It all came from Forrester Island.

That’s an uninhabited islet 40 or so miles southwest of Prince of Wales Island, known as Gaskuu in the Haida language.

Kit Cunningham is a technician with the state department of Fish and Game’s marine mammal program and a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She’s studying the garbage as part of a research project for her thesis.

“I want to know where the debris is coming from and how long it’s been in the water,” Cunningham said. “And one way we’re kind of looking into that is if there’s any growth on the marine debris.”

That growth is known as biofouling. Things like algae, barnacles and the like can offer clues about the origin of the marine debris that washes ashore.

“There’s always been quite a bit of trash and marine debris out there, so it was kind of the perfect candidate,” she said.

Working in shifts, Cunningham and two crews spent just over a month picking up trash on the island. The work was funded by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grant program.

But why does so much debris pile up on this particular island in the North Pacific? Cunningham said the location may have something to do with it.

“It’s something that I’m still learning about right now, but I would guess that since it’s along the continental shelf, a lot of currents go through there — there’s actually some really cool photos of storms rolling in,”  she explained. “And Forrester, Gaskuu, it’s actually the first thing they hit. So, I think just a lot of currents and storms, it’s just a perfect catching spot.”

Alaska General Seafoods provided two tenders and a skiff for the removal work. Alaska Marine Lines provided two, forty-foot-long shipping containers to transfer the garbage to Seattle.

Among the debris were a few glass buoys and bottles — one even had a note inside.

“It was pretty wild,” she said. “It was actually someone writing to a loved one who had passed, and just expressing a lot of love and appreciation for that person.”

But perhaps more interesting to Cunningham are the plastics: mostly old buoys, bottles and plastic foam.

She said her research into the debris could last into next summer, and she’ll try to determine what kinds of plastics were most common on the island.

But she’s not just studying the trash. While she was on the island, Cunningham collected the vomit samples from sea birds and fecal samples from Steller sea lions.  She’ll be sending those to a professor to see if there are any microplastics in the animal’s diets.

If there are, she wants to learn if it’s the same kind of plastic found on the island. She’s expecting results later this year.

In Juneau, precipitation has already increased by 20 inches a year in the last century and will continue to rise. Ocean warming will stress local marine ecosystems. More landslides will happen as the region gets warmer and wetter.

These are just a few of the takeaways from a Juneau-specific climate report released Monday by the University of Alaska Southeast’s Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center.

The report says it’s important that the City and Borough of Juneau already has plans in place to combat climate change, but it must make good on them and then go even further in its efforts.

“There are two messages: One, there are many impacts. Two, we are doing something about it. For a small community, that’s pretty impressive,” said Jim Powell, a UAS research professor and the lead author of the study.

Powell says the findings come with ideas for solutions that are within our reach on a local level.

“When polarization is occurring on the national side and the state side, local governments are making it happen,” Powell said.”We’re looking at the impacts as well as the things we can do and things that we’ve done.”

The city’s already taken some steps to address climate change. In 2001, Juneau was the first port in the world to connect cruise ships to hydropower — and it’s considering expanding that program from one dock to three.

The study recommends going even further than that: investing in 100% shore power for all cruise ships, limiting the number of ships in port to five, and monitoring ship emissions while in port.

Powell praised the city for setting a goal to have 80% renewable energy by 2045 and for having a climate action plan in place. But the study recommends the municipality go further by creating metrics to report progress on its goals to the public.

“If you don’t have indicators, you can’t manage. If you don’t have goals, you can’t manage,” Powell said.

The study was made possible by volunteer effort from more than two dozen Alaska scientists, the majority of whom are local to Juneau. Funding came from CBJ and the Department of Interior’s Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center, which is managed by the USGS National Climate Adaptation Center

Some study authors will host a webinar about their work at 9 a.m. on Thursday, July, 14.

University of Alaska Anchorage leaders are responding to criticism ahead of Saturday’s rally at the Alaska Airlines Center, where former President Donald Trump is set to campaign for three Republicans: Gov. Mike Dunleavy, U.S. House candidate Sarah Palin and U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka.

Some students, alumni and other community members have called for the university to cancel the event.

In a written message to the community last week, UAA Chancellor Sean Parnell wrote that the university must keep freedom of speech in mind when reviewing facilities-use requests. He emphasized that the university is not hosting the event — rather, the Save America political action committee is renting the Alaska Airlines Center.

“As a publicly funded university, it would be both illegal and unconstitutional to prevent a group from leasing university facilities based on speech that may occur in the facility or speech that we disagree with,” wrote Parnell, a former Republican Alaska governor. “Some exceptions to this First Amendment right do exist, but none of these exceptions apply in this case.”

Trump’s Save America PAC signed a lease agreement for $53,081 to use the Alaska Airlines Center. University spokesperson Catalina Myers said the university has not been paid upfront.

In a statement, student body president Katie Scoggin encouraged students to vote and to act safely and responsibly. At a meeting on Wednesday, vice president Shanone Tejada acknowledged students’ concerns.

“We are not hosting this event, nor do we condone any of the violence, hate and bigotry that is spewed from any character’s event,” he said. “We understand the concerns that students have been raising, and we are speaking with the administration about it.”

In his message, chancellor Parnell said the university, municipal partners and organizations in the area are working together to plan safety and security measures. He said the U.S. Secret Service is also coordinating security with local partners.

Trump is scheduled to deliver remarks at 4 p.m. Saturday.